


What Dreams May Come

by Mortissimo



Category: Brick (2005), Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-12
Updated: 2010-10-12
Packaged: 2017-10-12 14:55:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mortissimo/pseuds/Mortissimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur Brendan Frye's past is not as behind him as he'd thought it would be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Dreams May Come

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so this is weird in that a) it's a universe fusion that may or may not work and b) it works with an unpopular reading of the end of Inception.  
> Apparently.  
> I had no idea it was so unpopular until I was waist-deep in fan stuff, but here it is. Should be pretty obvious what I mean from the get-go.

Arthur can't remember any particular reason he ought to hate hospitals as much as he does, until he gets a frantic phone call in something halfway between French and English. Arthur has to take a plane to Los Angeles, has to stare dumbly down at his partner and probably the only person since high school he has really counted as a friend, now for all intents and purposes dead to the world. In his ear, there's a tearful explanation from Mal, but Arthur's not listening. Rationally, he knows that it's not really her fault, that she did everything she could (and probably more than she should), but she still got to grow old with him.

    And Arthur's always kind of been a loner. Sometimes he even believes that he's always wanted to be, that it wasn't the violent impulses he barely learned to rein in after he got to college that had cost him his friends, lost him Em. He's much better at that kind of thing now, tightly slicked-back and buttoned-down, strolling out of the hospital like he's just been given a clean bill of health while his best friend and partner lies there in what is probably an irreparable coma. Between the phone call and the visit, Arthur had gotten the impression that Mal hadn't managed to stop crying since she woke up and Dom didn't, and he's not far from the truth. Arthur, who hasn't cried much since, well, that thing with Emily, doesn't know what to say and so he leaves.

    Arthur doesn't know what he'll do. He's only ever done this with Cobb. Maybe he'll go from having a steady practice with a fairly reliable partner, to being an independent contractor. He could a few jobs, here and there, mostly with contacts from previous ones, but Arthur's work is not popular. The spaces that Arthur creates are too slick, too tightly tamped-down for most people's minds to accept them as truth. Arthur's dreams are made out of wood and metal and glass, because if he lets his mind drift they end up in darkness, and water, and drifting blond hair. There's also the matter of the ghost.

    The few people who knew Arthur before he quit being embarrassed of his given name are not people he tells about his occupation. None of Brendan Frye's acquaintances really know Arthur-Just-Arthur, which suits him fine. If any of them had followed him out of high school, though, they might have guessed that his dreams would be haunted by Em, or Dode, or the Pin. People he'd killed before he'd known what he was doing. One or two (Arthur avoids his 10-year reunion specifically to avoid Laura) might even have guessed that the specter would be small, unnamed, and sexless.

    The ghost first shows up when Arthur is a junior in college, recently transferred and newly re-christened 'Arthur' and just starting to get into this whole lucid dreaming thing. It's around the second week of the classes that Arthur starts to feel a presence in his dreams, like he's being watched. At first, it's something that freaks him out, leaves him waking in a cold sweat and panting, heart pounding and legs ready to run. After a while, though, it starts to turn into something a lot less sinister, and a lot more like. Well. His professor calls it his 'guardian angel', which Arthur knows now and knew then is bullshit, because if there had been an angel watching out for him, none of that stuff could've happened. Whatever the case, though, he learns to accept the presence, and move on in his lessons.

    After that, the fuss when he first starts to see the ghost is almost minimal. It, because Arthur first naturally thinks of him as an 'it', appears when Arthur is dreaming as a flicker in the corner of his eye. Having by now long had the sensation of someone standing over his shoulder, Arthur finally has the image as well, but every time he turns to pin it down, the image is gone. It's something which only appears to him in periphery, in silhouette, but there is not and never was any doubt in his mind that the image belongs to the presence. Eventually, he makes the mistake of getting used to it.

    The reason this is a mistake is pretty evident when he starts training for his current job. His teacher is not by nature a skittish woman, he doesn't think, but the first time she appears in one of his dreams he can't help but notice her shuddering. She asks him, not kindly, what the fuck is wrong with him, and he tells her, honestly, that he doesn't know, and then asks her what she means. As it turns out, the presence in Arthur's head is more than just a presence in Arthur's head. Other dreamers feel it too, which is probably not a positive thing when it comes to subtlety. His teacher tells him to find a shrink, and so Arthur finds a different teacher, a man named Cobb who proves, for whatever reason, to be slightly more open-minded. Arthur tells Cobb about the ghost straight away, and Cobb bats an eyelash, but that's the extent of it. Dom Cobb is a steady man with a steady girl and a steady life, for all that their profession is not a naturally steady one, and Arthur benefits from the partnership as much in Cobb's good example as he does in the actual earning of money.

    Which they do, eventually, extensively.

    The money goes towards suits, and haircuts, and yoga lessons, and everything else that helps Arthur hold onto himself. It does not go towards a girl, or a man, because while Cobb is Arthur's rock, Cobb's love life was also a foregone conclusion long before he met Arthur, and Arthur doesn't think there's another man alive he can trust. As for girls, if he hadn't learned his lesson with Kara and he hadn't learned it with Em, he definitely learned it with Laura. There's no woman alive he trusts. What this boils down to is, in essence, a series of meaningless affairs, largely with people temporarily hired to aid Arthur and Cobb's partnership, people Arthur never expects to see again. He is consistently but expressionlessly embarrassed when his expectations are not met. There's a particularly unsubtle one who calls him 'darling'; the less dwelt upon Eames the better.

    To sum up, Arthur learns. He learns to be convincing, awake and asleep, and he learns how to learn every detail of a person's life, and he learns how to put that to good use. He learns how to construct those gleaming interiors of his mind, and how to twist them gently but firmly into something unreal but believable. Arthur even learns how to quiet the demons of his subconscious, how to convince them not to tear every intruder to shreds with their fingernails. Water, and arches, and blond hair, eventually stop figuring heavily in every last contained world he creates, and sometimes he thinks Cobb and he get along so well because Cobb knows, and has always known, when not to question something.

    What Arthur does not learn how to do is make the ghost go away. Instead, as Arthur works to make his unconscious something consciously malleable, the ghost takes sharper form as well. Arthur doesn't know when he first noticed that the ghost was blond, or a man, but one day he turns around in a gleaming impossible street and the flicker is still right in the center of vision. Now that his eyes, or his brain, or whatever, can finally focus on the ghost, Arthur doesn't know why he hadn't seen it before. He steps closer, and the ghost still doesn't move. Closer, and if the ghost was a person they'd be nose-to-nose or, more appropriately, nose-to-chin, since the ghost seems to have a few inches on Arthur. That's about all Arthur can make out, though. The ghost is taller than him. The ghost is blond, but it's a short blond, a fuzzy blond, a blond that doesn't give Arthur screaming nightmares. The ghost is pale. The ghost is a man. The last one Arthur figures out by walking a slow circle around him, shivering in his sleep as the feeling of being watched sends fingers crawling up his spine. Finally, Arthur stops where he started, staring down the watcher, close enough to kiss.

    "Who were you?" He asks, and the words taste strange, like they're the first words he's spoken in years. The ghost doesn't reply, but when Arthur raises a hand to touch him, he disappears and Arthur wakes up, sheets tangled around his legs like he's been running in his sleep again.

    Arthur doesn't tell Cobb about it. Dom and Mal have just had their second child, and so the partnership is on hiatus though Arthur still takes jobs on the side. He wouldn't say he feels neglected, but when his fingers curl around the sixth glass of scotch and help him knock it back with nary a wince, he has to consider that there might be reasons for heavy and sudden bouts of drinking beyond being weirded out by the ghost. Though that's pretty big. Part of it, he would guess if he had to, lies in not having worked for any real reason for several months. Not to be misleading, Arthur loves gathering information for gathering information's sake, not to mention money's sake, but it's even better when he has someone to tell it to who's going to listen. That Cobb is attractive as well as being appreciative and attentive doesn't hurt, Arthur thinks ruefully. The wave of empathy blindsides him so hard he gags and blinks back tears, but leaves him no more enlightened than before it had hit. Arthur pours another drink with shaking hands and presses it to his forehead, like it's going to speed up the thinking process if he applies it topically. He doesn't understand the sudden fierceness of his feelings for Cobb, doesn't understand why now he misses all the books and files and personal information he's sifted through for Dom, why he remembers now the shock and pain of watching Dom die, over and over again, in their dreams and in others'. He wishes there was someone he could go to for advice, but his only advisor is Cobb, and he's Cobb's only advisor, which can put them into a vicious cycle out of which no new information is gained. Arthur wonders why it is that his only friends are his partners in crime, and then he wonders why he hasn't thought of the Brain since graduation.

    Puzzled, nostalgic, more than a little drunk, Arthur falls into bed. He tries to jerk off, half-heartedly, but his brain keeps yanking him back to high school, and everything that meant to him, and back to the Brain's eyes, owlish and sad behind huge glasses, until finally Arthur gives up, rolls over, and sleeps dreamlessly.

    Time moves on, and with further inspection the ghost gains in clarity, or else Arthur is able to pick out more details. The ghost has big ears. Ungainly, not particularly attractive. Brown eyes, or green, or hazel. That in-between color. Either he dresses in muted colors or the ghost just is muted colors, tans and pale blues and washed-out reds. He dresses like Arthur used to, or like someone Arthur used to know, hunched inside his coat. He doesn't think he recognizes a specific person in the ghost's frustratingly flickering colors, but whenever Arthur catches a glimpse of him, Arthur gets a feeling of unshakeable and slightly guilty nostalgia.

    It might be wishful thinking, but as the ghost gains further solidity, it seems to learn manners as well. Whenever Arthur hosts, which isn't often, the presence is not as omnipresent as it used to be, and the flickers of the ghost come rarely, briefly, and only when Arthur is alone. A more superstitious man than Arthur might be tempted to believe that something from beyond is communicating with him; Arthur, however, knows perfectly well that there are things from his past he's suppressing, things that bubble up through the cracks sometimes. The only thing haunting Arthur's dreams is Arthur, or rather Brendan, though he draws the distinction only to make the timeline clear. Never mind that the ghost looks nothing like him, nobody ever said projections of the brain have to make sense.

    Things get weird after one of the few side jobs of his that go without a hitch. Arthur had been hosting, making their unqualified success even rarer. The ghost was nowhere in sight. He had been working with Eames on this one, which had meant throughout the evening Arthur had withstood looks and winks and pinches from various anonymous but attractive strangers. He'd said nothing at the time, though mentally he'd rearranged his schedule to allow for an hour or so, maybe half an hour, of free space between the end of the thing, their getaway, and Arthur's assessment of it. After all, the man was a jackass, but he's undoubtedly a hot jackass nonetheless, and one who evidently feels the same about Arthur. Anyway, the job went well, and at the end they cluster together on top of a too-clean rooftop. The extractor jumps first, the flutter of her hair as she falls bringing an unwelcome flinch to Arthur before she disappears from sight. Eames is next in line, one foot already up on the ledge of the roof, when he turns around and grabs Arthur by the lapels, pulls him close, kisses him hard. They're alone, so it's not a problem, and it isn't unusual, which is why Arthur is surprised to find himself lying on his back on the rough tarmac, blinking upwards as Eames is shoved over the edge. The ghost is between them, looking as insubstantial as ever though it's pretty clear he's anything but insubstantial, turned towards Arthur with no discernible face, let alone a discernible expression.

    "What the fuck," Arthur asks, bewildered. He knows he's got a minute or two before Eames gives him the kick, probably unpleasantly after what just happened. The ghost says nothing, only crouches next to him, puts a hand on either side of Arthur's head. The solidity of his hands is startling, more so when Arthur reaches up to cover one with his own. There are fingers, knuckles, even fingernails, ragged and bitten. The skin under his fingertips feels a little dry, but soft, and uncannily cold. It makes him a little seasick to look at the blur in place of the ghost's face from this close, so Arthur shuts his eyes, and jerks when he gets kissed. The ghost's lips are as cold and dry as his hands, soft but faintly chapped, tasting of nothing in particular. Blindly, Arthur winds a hand into the ghost's hair, finds it short and neat, licks his way into the cold mouth. Pressed up close, the ghost seems to be wearing glasses that Arthur hadn't seen before, pushing a cold plastic line into Arthur's cheekbone. He's technically aware that he's making out with his subconscious, and a frustratingly cryptic part of it as well, but since his subconscious apparently felt free to throw Arthur's fuck-buddy off the roof, Arthur at least wants a kiss out of the bargain. The pressure and slide of the ghost's mouth is distracting enough that Arthur doesn't feel the rounded squares of metal pressed into his palm until his fingers are closed around them and squeezed, hard, enough to hurt.

    He lets go of the ghost, and opens his eyes, and there's nothing next to him but there is a silver chain dangling from his clenched fist. They're dogtags, when he uncurls his fingers, and he stares down at them in stupid confusion. He feels like they ought to be significant, and certainly his subconscious seems to think that they're significant, but when he turns them over they're completely blank, though covered in a light patina of scratches from, apparently, daily wear by the ghost. Or something. Blank dogtags, but Arthur can't find any significance in them no matter how hard he wracks his brain. It's too late, anyway, and Arthur finds himself on his back on the floor instead of the roof, the wind knocked out of him, staring at an empty hand.

    He doesn't have sex with Eames that night after all, though he does have some success at jerking off despite his brain's unwillingness to move past big hazel eyes and blunt, quick fingers and an unhappy, narrow mouth. Arthur dreams, but doesn't remember it, and so when he wakes up he decides that he ought to talk to Cobb about it after all, because there's something inexplicably helpful to Arthur in bouncing his unfocused thoughts off of a receptive audience. Of course, this is when Mr. and Mrs. Cobb take their little vacation into Cobb-Land, and Dom never wakes up.

    Arthur gets the phone call, gets on a plane, remembers that he hates hospitals, and he leaves, walking the couple of miles back to his hotel room. His cell phone rings a couple times but he ends up turning it off, dropping down onto the hotel bed without even taking off his jacket. It takes him a long time to fall asleep, and when he finally does open his eyes in the dream, he's behind the school, sitting on the low wall there. The ghost is sitting across from him, with his back against the wall of the school, where Brendan knew the bricks are still warm from the morning sun.

    "So what part of my subconscious are you supposed to be?" He asks the ghost, raising his eyebrows and feeling the healing skin from the multiple splits in his face tug warningly. For a long time, the ghost doesn't move, and Arthur begins to think that maybe he can't communicate with Arthur after all. Finally, though, the ghost unlatches the battered briefcase next to him that Arthur hadn't noticed before, scrawls a brief note on the back of a returned test, and holds it out to Arthur. Slowly, he slides off the wall, settling his aching feet carefully one by one on the ground, testing to make sure his trembling legs can maintain his weight. They can, and Arthur takes the few steps forward that let him grab the paper, and hold it up in front of him.

    'BRENDAN YOU'RE AN IDIOT', the note says. The jagged block capitals are, for whatever reason, more familiar than the dull flicker in front of him, more familiar than the dream-fragments of eye and mouth and hand. Arthur swallows thickly, feels his throat click.

    "I'm sorry." Arthur Brendan Frye lowers the note, looks at the ghost of his only friend in high school, and he doesn't understand what the hell is wrong with him that he couldn't see it before, didn't remember the dog tags or the glasses or the blank, hopeless look. The ghost of the Brain is still fuzzy around the edges, still indistinct, but now that Arthur knows what he is, who he is, he couldn't be anything else. Turning, Arthur slumps against the wall and slides until his legs are splayed out before him, knee knocking against the Brain's, pressed together from shoulder to hip. It's a posture they fell into many times, particularly in that one hellish week, but Arthur can't ever remember the Brain dropping a hand on his thigh before, squeezing just above a massive bruise in the shape of Tug's fist. He lets go to reach and take the test out of Arthur's hands, scribbling for a long time under the note before he hands it back to Arthur.

    'BRENDAN YOU'RE AN IDIOT  
    FOR A LONG TIME I THOUGHT  
    I WAS IN HELL BECAUSE I COULD  
    SEE YOU BUT I COULDN'T  
    TALK TO YOU OR TOUCH YOU  
    BUT THEN  (crossed out)  
    I'M SORRY I KILLED THAT GUY'

    Arthur stares at the note for a long time, willing it to make sense, willing it to mean anything deeper than what it says on the page. Whatever insights his subconscious has for him are apparently destined to remain subconscious, or at the very least frustratingly cryptic.

    "Why would I dream this?" He wonders aloud. Being doomed to have a conversation with himself, Arthur figures he might as well throw himself into it wholesale. To his surprise, the ghost takes the test back, flips to the back of another page, and scrawls something out in angry strokes before crumpling the page up and bouncing it off of Arthur's bruised forehead.

    'THAT'S A SHITTY THING FOR A HALLUCINATION TO SAY'.

    Well.

    Arthur's not sure what to say to that.

    Except.

    Well.

    "And that is a predictable thing for a dream to say." Arthur can't see the Brain's expression, but he doesn't think it's happy. He writes back.

    'I DON'T THINK I'M DREAMING I THINK I'M STILL DYING'.

    "Brain-"

    But it's too late, because Arthur is face-to-face with the hotel room carpet and Mal's shoes, listening to her accent fight it out with Eames' accent. It's no use trying to pretend he's still asleep so he pushes himself to his feet and reluctantly lets the conversation, the argument really, wash into him. Neither of them admits that he or she was the one to push him off the bed, but he kind of suspects Mal, because she looks a lot madder. Of course, they're arguing about Cobb. Arthur is vaguely surprised that Mal would've called Eames in as well, since he wouldn't have counted the man a friend, at least not of Cobb's. Apparently he was wrong. It's probably only a matter of time before Yusuf shows up. He's probably further away.

    Feeling disjointed, disconnected, melancholy, Arthur lets Mal and Eames have their argument and sits down on the bed, pulling out his laptop. He leans back against the headboard and crosses his legs on the bedspread without removing his shoes, something he knows he's yelled at more than one person for doing, but it really doesn't seem as important as it should right now. Basically, what he's doing is his job, so he pulls up all the right places to search for people in a matter of seconds, once he gets the internet up and going, and then he has to sit there for a few seconds and stare stupidly into the zero results he manages to pull up using the search term 'Brain, The'. Arthur frowns at it for a moment before he deletes and types in the right name, the one that's really the wrong name. It's not a bad name, it's no 'Arthur', but everyone who knew the Brain knew him as the Brain, and as far as Arthur knows the Brain was fine with it being that way.

    The Brain's name comes up in exactly the places Arthur had been hoping he wouldn't find anything, but he forces himself to read the medical reports anyway.

    'Zolpidem' he recognizes from talking to, or rather from being talked at by, Yusuf.

    'Diazepam' Arthur has to Google, not that knowing what it means changes what the words on the page are telling him. Basically the only two words he needs to know are 'overdose' and 'coma', and those Arthur already knows the meaning of. When Mal grabs the computer away from him Arthur almost hits her, would have done if it had been Eames. He stands anyway, sliding off the bed with a thunk, his hands fisted at his sides. If he hadn't switched to contacts he would be taking his glasses off now, even though she's a woman, even though she's Cobb's wife, even though he kind of likes her despite that she's a woman and Cobb's wife.

    "Give it back," he tells her, flat and tight like he hasn't spoken to anyone for days. He can see she's upset, but as she looks at the screen Arthur watches her expression shift through to surprise. Behind her, Eames looks edgy, probably ready to jump in if Arthur gives in to the threat of his body language and takes a swing. Thankfully, Mal does hand the computer over without protest, her brows knitting.

    "That's not his," she observes unnecessarily as Arthur sits down and scrolls back up to the PDF's header.

    "Cobb's not the only thing I care about." Even though not long ago this would have been a lie, or more exactly, something he wouldn't have said because he'd have been at a loss as to how he would claim otherwise.

    "All right," Mal says, slowly, and in her voice Arthur can hear her calculating, reassessing. If he didn't know her as well as he did, Arthur would suspect that she was hesitating or translating. "But could we discuss him anyway?" It does what it's meant to do. Namely, Arthur feels bad. Maybe he's not cut out for keeping more than one friend at a time. He sits back down on the bed, refusing to apologize because that would mean he's admitting wrongdoing.

    In short, though, nothing is decided that night. Mal leaves, returning to the Cobb home to comfort the children and worry about her husband. Eames leaves too, but lingeringly, dissatisfied with the explanations Arthur tries to give for his ghost's intrusions into their last job. It's clear from his posture, from the way his eyes rake over Arthur, that Eames doesn't particularly want to be anywhere else, but all Arthur wants to do is sleep, and so Eames goes downstairs and gets another room in the same hotel, or goes to a different one, or goes to the bar. Arthur doesn't particularly care.

    It takes him a long time to get to sleep, undressed but flat on top of the covers and staring up at the pristine white ceiling. When he finally does sleep, he doesn't dream for a long time, or he dreams in brief snips that have no importance, definitely no bearing on what he's looking for, which makes them maddening where usually they'd be nothing more than annoying. Until finally he opens his eyes, and he's back in his hotel room, staring up at the same ceiling, but the Brain is sitting next to him. He looks tired, like he hasn't slept in years when just the opposite is true of the real deal. But he does look solid, which is enough to startle Arthur into sitting, turning to face him. At this, the Brain blinks, but his gaze seems unfocused. Or rather, focused elsewhere, as Arthur realizes he'd dreamed both the space and himself in the same way they'd been when he'd gone to sleep. He smiles, crookedly.

    "If you can't be naked in front of your dreams, who can you be naked in front of?" The Brain just looks at him, for a long time, closely enough that Arthur starts to feel slightly uncomfortable after all.

    "The last book I read was _The Sound and the Fury_ ," the Brain says, and then when Arthur blinks he adds, "oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were having a non sequitur contest." He sounds so unlike the Brain that Arthur remembers, so slow and deliberate and utterly free of patois, that Arthur can help but despise himself, a little, for the unfaithful portrayal.

    "You look the same, but you're not how I remember you at all," he muses aloud, because why not. Across the bed from him, the Brain frowns, and finally peels his eyes away from Arthur's body by taking his glasses off and forcibly pinching the bridge of his nose.

    He looks so tired.

    "I don't know how long I've been here, but I hadn't seen you for a few years, I guess, when I-" He stops, brought up short by the subject matter but still trying to force something out, so the Brain ends up flapping his mouth like a landed fish. Arthur's heart skips a beat, sickeningly.      


    "You meant to-" He forgets he's talking to himself. It is a dream, after all.

    "I took all of my Valium and all of my mom's Ambien. I meant to."

    "Jesus," Arthur mutters, hoarse when he finally trusts his voice enough to say even that much. He reaches out and wraps a hand around the Brain's arm.    

"Everything was so gray, Brendan," he says after a long moment. Arthur moves closer, fighting to pick up each word. "Everything has always been so grey." He uses his grip to pull the Brain closer, and the Brain goes, like an obedient dream, laying his head on Arthur's bare collarbone. There's something trying to claw its way out of Arthur's chest, something that goes quiet a little when he wraps his arms around the Brain's shoulders, broader than he would have thought. Eventually, the Brain looks up, and kisses him, cautiously, like he thinks Arthur's going to bolt or something

    "I'd have tried it in real life, but I've seen you hit pretty hard," the Brain murmurs against his mouth. Or something. It says something that Arthur's subconscious apparently thinks he's an asshole. Also, Arthur can feel himself starting to get hard, which is kind of strange because he's been too self-conscious to have a wet dream since he started this job, and would be kind of awkward if he was less sure the old friend he'd dragged into his lap is a dream. The hand stroking up his thigh doesn't help, but the way the Brain's mouth tastes, cool and damp and like he's never eaten anything in his life, is surreal enough that it grounds him a little. The Brain's fingers lace through hair, tugging it out of order despite the pomade.

    "Better," he says, sitting back a little to take it all in. "You were starting to look like Chris." Arthur arches an eyebrow, and the Brain clarifies, "My ex. One and only. Freshman year. I wonder if he feels bad-?" Before Arthur can feel bad, he takes the Brain's face in his hands, strokes along the Brain's cheekbones, which quiets him more or less immediately. Arthur ducks his head to kiss his friend, again, but there's a weird thing that' been eating away at the back of his head, not explicit, but making it impossible to concentrate.

    "Where did you go?" He asks, softly. The Brain pulls away and frowns.

    "Where did I go... To college?" Arthur nods, and he covers his face with his hands and groans, though since he rests his head against Arthur's shoulder regardless it's not too bad."You are a shitty hallucination," he says, muffled, and then more clearly: "Stanford." Usually Arthur's dreams are more cagey about supplying false and easily-checked information, so this weirds Arthur out more than a little.

    "What's Chris' full name?" The Brain doesn't look up.

    "Christopher Alan Jacobsen." There's a lilt to it, like he's copying someone else's pronunciation. "Does this not seem a little off the script to you, Brendan?"

    "I'm going by Arthur again," Arthur says, "and my life has gotten considerably less normal since you last knew me." Brain whistles, lowly.

    "Did you always-" Arthur can't quite bring himself to finish asking the question of a fairly self-indulgent hallucination, so he swallows his words halfway spoken, but Brain seems to understand regardless because he nods.

    "Always."

    Outside, in the dream or in reality, Arthur can hear faint sounds of traffic, and he wonders if this is what survivor's guilt feels like, or if it's something else.

    "I'll be right back," he promises as he rolls over and pulls his revolver out from where he knows he keeps it in hotel rooms, between the mattress and box springs. Holding onto his arm, Brain looks like he doesn't know if he wants to bolt or wrestle for the piece. Arthur doesn't give him a chance, just sticks the barrel in his mouth and pulls the trigger. It takes him a few seconds to die, and for every minute eternity of it, he can hear Brain screaming.

    It's startling enough that Arthur wakes gasping, his hand spasming on empty air. Above him, the ceiling is exactly the same, down to the cracks, and when he sits up he can see all the little folds in the quilt that should have been disrupted by another body in bed with him, but they aren't. He wants that, he thinks, wants Brain in bed with him, but he doesn't understand fully where that comes from. They'd been friends for a long time, a long time, in high school and before, and there was nobody he'd trusted more with some of the hardest things, but Arthur doesn't think he ever wanted the Brain. Leaning over, he pulls his laptop onto the quilt next to him and starts bringing up lists. It's not as easy as he would have thought to get Stanford's page of student suicides, but all it takes in the end is a little Wayback Machine and there it is.

    He'd been in the CS department, no surprise, and they'd left up a little memorial thing for him, for a while, with a picture and a paragraph and well-wishes. Not a lot, and none of them personal, but it's the picture that catches Arthur's attention, because the Brain just hadn't changed. In the picture he looked older, and tired, but he still wore the same glasses, the same plaid shirts, the same suede jacket, the same dog tags. Arthur scrolls down, to the little meaningless blurbs of regret. He's not sure what he's looking for until finds it, and then he has to sit back and stare at the screen for a long time. It's at the bottom of the page, no more than a handful of words: _I miss you - Chris._

    Unlike Brain, Christopher Alan Jacobsen from Stanford does have a Facebook page, presumably because he hasn't been unconscious for the past five years. Arthur looks at him for a long time, too, clicking through what little is public of someone who seems quiet, sullen, barely appearing even in his own profile pictures. He doesn't slick his hair back in any but the oldest pictures available. If there are any pictures of him smiling, they're not tagged. It's depressingly familiar.

    It takes him half an hour and two bottles of god-awful from the minibar to fall back asleep, and when Arthur opens his eyes he's standing in a field. The grass is churned and muddy, the sky pale, orangeish blue, the kind that comes in the early morning. Ahead of him, the football field, the fence, and behind the fence the gorge and the tunnel. Behind him, the soccer field, the school. When Arthur turns to glance at them the Brain is there, briefcase in one hand and revolver in the other. He's covered in blood, from the chest up, and in his hair there are little bits of.

    Well.

    "Brain," he tries, but Brain makes his mouth a thin, hard line, and shakes his head.

    "You never do that again." His voice sounds harsh, like maybe he hadn't stopped screaming from then until just now.

    "It's how you get out of the dream, Brain," Arthur tries to protest, but Brain interrupts by winging the briefcase at his head. He misses.

    "It didn't work too well for me, did it," he observes flatly, no inflection in his voice. The windowed-off eyes are harder to read.

    "Brain-"

    "Stop saying that."

    "You're not dead." Arthur snaps, quickly, before he can get in another word. "I don't know what happened, but you're not dead." He pauses, waiting for an interruption.

    "Yeah?"

    "You're in a coma. And I don't know why, but you gave me new information, and that, that should not be possible. You shouldn't be able to do that. I don't know what that means."

    "Yeah?"

    "You sound like Brad." Arthur tries to smile, but Brain isn't buying it.

    "Watching you die was not only my worst nightmare but also a very real possibility for a while there, Brendan. I think forgetting having it happen all over me is going to take me a little longer."

    "Yeah?" Arthur asks, and finally he gets something like a fleetingly soft look out of Brain.

    "Yeah."

    "I'm sorry. I didn't think you wouldn't know." The Brain seems to realise what he's holding, and drops the gun into the mud.

    "I knew. I just never saw it from close before." Arthur frowns, sliding his hands into the pockets of his coat (back in his high school wardrobe, rigidly plain) and taking a few steps towards him.

    "But you saw it? Every time?"

    "That'd be the other reason I thought I was in hell."

    "You saw every job?"

    "Confusing hell," Brain amends.

    "Nakatomi? Inspirate? Seward & Bough? The Richardson travesty? Jiu Hong?" Every one but the last, he nods his understanding, and that one had taken place somewhere else. Every home game. Every crime committed in Arthur's head had a witness.

    "You live a very weird and sordid life, Brendan."

    "I'm coming to get you," Arthur decides suddenly, and the Brain blinks a little from the whiplash, or from the blood clotting his eyelashes, painting the inside of his glasses.

    "You're what?"

    "Coming to get you. I know where you are. You're in Union Memorial. I'm downtown, I can get there by noon and I think I can help you." Arthur can't help it, he grins despite himself. "Then I think you can help me a little." If Brain did this, if Brain clawed his way up from the shared limbo of deep dreamers and coma patients, if he found the thin thread of Arthur Brendan Frye's consciousness and tugged 'til he came to the source, maybe he can find Cobb and drag him back too.

    "You're gonna haul me out of a coma because I can help you." Brain smiles, quickly and unhappily. "Sweet." Because he's close enough to by now, and because somehow everyone he knows consistently misses the point, Arthur grabs Brain by the lapels of his battered (blood-smeared) coat and yanks him down to kiss him on his (blood-smeared) mouth.

    "No," Arthur says, then: "wait for me at the library," as he picks up the gun and starts to make his way across the football field.

    "See you soon," echoes back to him across the distance. As soon as Arthur is there, standing under the arch where Tug killed Emily and Dode, he shoots himself before he can check to see if the body's there as well.

    When he wakes up, the first thing he does is call Mal. It's still pre-dawn, but she picks up immediately, and from her tone alone Arthur guesses that she hasn't slept yet. He doesn't blame her. The story isn't a totally sensical or simple thing, but Arthur explains as much as he can. He doesn't explain about Em and the Pin and Laura, but he explains whatever is left about the Brain. When he gets to the part about the Stanford page Mal inhales sharply and swears, under her breath, in French. She goes on to interrogate him, trying to poke holes in what he knows sounds like a wall of pure bullshit. For a minute, after he asks for the PASIV and gets nothing but silence, Arthur worries that he might have to do something drastic, but eventually he can hear Mal sigh and assent. Arthur orders a cab to the hospital and, once they pull up, flashes the driver a roll of fifties and tells him to wait, which he agrees to do.     Mal's sitting next to the bed when Arthur comes in, carefully shuts the door behind him. She doesn't turn to look, just gestures to the side of the bed, the silver suitcase sitting on the floor. He promises her that he'll get Cobb out, that they will, that he'll return the PASIV soon, that everything will be all right, as he leans down and kisses her cheek. But she doesn't look at him, and he can't look at Cob, lying there deathly still, and so Arthur grabs the case and walks out. The cab's still there when he gets to the ground floor, and he's slightly surprised, but immensely gratified. Not so much as a raised eyebrow as Arthur gives the address of another hospital, and in far less time than it would have taken to get there safely and legally, they're there. Arthur gives the cabbie an unadvisedly large number of bills from his roll of money and gets out.

    The job Arthur does is so predicated on lying that he doesn't even realize he's doing it, lying his way smoothly up the hospital building until he's standing at the doors to the coma ward, having been a doctor, a lawyer, a friend, a lover, and a parent along the way. His mother would have been so proud. Arthur's not sure where he stands, exactly. His palm rests between the two doors, the gap between them a warm breath. The floor is clean, recently buffed. Or maybe it's just that nobody comes this way, Arthur thinks, and hates himself for having so thoroughly forgotten Brain all those years. He wonders, can't help but wonder, if he would have come earlier, had he known. Would Arthur have sat by the bedside of Brain as he refuses now to sit by Cobb? Or, Brain being as far as he could tell unattached to any human being, would Arthur have felt obligated? Would he have wanted to?

    "I hate hospitals," Arthur mutters, and pushes through the doors. Inside the room, the quiet is oppressive. Far from filling it, the faintly beeping heart monitors seem to accentuate the lack of any other sound. As he walks, slowly, dragging his heels, Arthur gets the impression that he's walking through a morgue, from the stillness and unconscious order of the bodies. The patients. The people. He feels nauseated, walking between the rows of people until he comes to the end, to a thin silhouette, and a too-long shock of blond hair on the pillow.

    Arthur stops.

    There's a chair next to the bed, and a bedside table as well, holding a copy of _The Sound and the Fury_ and a battered comb. On top of the book are the folded glasses that Arthur anytime, anywhere, would recognize as Brain's, and curled up next to them are the dog tags, which Arthur had the temerity and the vodka to ask about one night, and which Brain told him, quietly, had belonged to his father.

    Brain's person, reduced to a handful of items.

    Arthur wonders if he'd finished the book.

    Eventually, he sets the PASIV down on the bed at Brain's feet, and walks to the head of the bed. He reaches out, but hesitates, his hand hovering indecisively over Brain's impassive face. He looks strange, Arthur thinks, without the glasses, finally lowering a fingertip to trace the line of an eyebrow. Someone must come in to shave him, because as he runs a hand over the line of Brain's jaw, there's no trace of stubble. And though he can see, uncomfortably, the lump of a g-tube at Brain's abdomen, there's no cannula, no breathing tube taped to Brain's mouth, so he must be... Brain has to be alive, in there. And in Arthur.

    Arthur turns the lock and thumbs open the case of the PASIV. The operation of the thing is so clear to him now, after all his years using it, that he doesn't even really have to look until it comes time to plug them in. The Brain's too-thin arm is already a mess of needle marks and IV lines, but he's pale, has always been pale, and eventually Arthur does find a vein, if with difficulty. After that it's easy enough to slide the needle into his own arm, finding the spot as much by feeling as by sight. He gives them, maybe optimistically, ten minutes, and sits down in the chair, then closes his eyes.

    Cold water rushes over his feet, slicking his shoes and drenching his socks. With a look of dismay, Arthur steps out of the stream winding from the tunnel, and starts up the side of the gorge without looking back to see what the darkness holds. He is, for the first time, really himself in this place. The dull, nameless uniform of his school days has been replaced by his present attire, or what he'd like to wear at any rate, all black suit and pomade and constraint. So the shoes are more pricey than they would've been, no matter how much a part of the dream they are.

    It's up the gorge, across the field, and past the portables, just like old times, and just like old times, there's nobody there. Just Arthur and the person he came to see.

    Eventually Arthur pushes open the door of the library, and it's completely dark inside, even though he can't exactly remember if it was light outside or not. It hardly seems important. Inside, it's dark, except for one small reading light, and that's what Arthur heads for, barking his shins on a multitude of chairs along the way. When he gets where he's going, he sits down across the desk, and Brain shuts the book he'd been reading.

    "Any good?" Arthur asks, inclining his head, and Brain shrugs.

    "They're all blank here." He tosses it to Arthur, as an example, and Arthur checks it even though he knows it's true.

    "Sorry. I never did study enough."

    "Never did," the Brain agrees, and that's the first real smile Arthur's seen from him in he doesn't know how long.

    "Come on." Holding out a hand, because he wants to see some more. The Brain takes his hand and stands. Arthur doesn't let him go, lacing their fingers tightly together in a way that would have meant kicking Brad Bramish's face in a whole lot more if they'd tried it walking through the real school.

    "Where are we going?"

    "Home."

    "Then that's my bus." Arthur turns, leans around Brain, and surely enough, there it is, the zero bus in all its smoky glory. The early morning light paints the yellow a more somber tone, or at least a softer tone. Then the doors hiss open in front of them. Arthur can't see the driver's face clearly, but that doesn't matter because the Brain is pulling him along, to the back of the bus, where they press together in a seat much too small for actual adults. The Brain pulls a Rubik's Cube out of somewhere and hands it wordlessly to Arthur, who messes it up for him and hands it back. Quiet clicks fill the air as the bus begins to move.

    "Did you finish _The Sound and the Fury_?" Arthur asks, draping an arm over Brain's shoulders so he can press that tiny bit closer. Despite all his solidity, all his sudden communicativeness, Brain hasn't got any warmer, and he still smells that strange non-smell that Arthur is beginning to realize is antiseptic.

    "I don't remember," Brain says distractedly, then hands the completed cube back to Arthur. He turns it over in his hands, then places it to the other side of him from Brain, where it slides with a clatter off the vinyl seat.

    "I don't know how to wake you up," Arthur confesses, and the Brain leans in and kisses him.

    Arthur opens his eyes.

    The ceiling is tiled, white, and half in shadow, because in the pre-dawn the hospital doesn't want to waste a lot of power lighting a room of people who don't open their eyes.

    On the bed, the PASIV countdown is blinking zeros.

    Arthur covers his face with his hands and swears, passionately.

    "Arthur." He turns, and looks, and those are the Brain's unshielded eyes staring at him, squinting really. In a rare moment of carelessness, Arthur tugs the IV lead out of his arm, lets the thin trickle of blood begin to soak into his trousers, and staggers to his feet.

    "Let me get those for you." Arthur leans over and grabs the glasses off the table. They're dusty, so he cleans them on his pocket square, probably the first time he's used it for anything, then slides them onto the Brain's face.

    "Thanks," Brain croaks, and quirks his mouth in a wan kind of smile. Despite the long sleep, there are purple circles under his eyes, and his hair is poking out every way possible and slightly too long, and despite that his ears still stick out too much, his eyes look comically big under his glasses, and he looks heavily drugged. He's beautiful.

    "You're beautiful," he tells the Brain, who laughs at him.

    "Now I know I'm not awake yet." To prove him wrong, Arthur reaches into his pocket and pulls out his little red die, tosses it on the table. On the bed, the Brain is raising his eyebrows, which is reasonable.

    "In the real world it always rolls the same number." He throws it a few more times, to be sure, but Brain's eyes are on his face.    "So that was you?" Arthur nods. "Every time?"

    "Probably."    

    "Even when you were naked in the hotel room and...?" Arthur nods. "Oh."

    "What is it?"

    "Nothing, I just wouldn't have thought..."

    "Yeah." Arthur gives in and lays his hand along the side of Brain's face again, but this time Brain smiles, so it's a much more rewarding experience.

    "Brendan... Sorry, Arthur, I think I'm gonna-" Interrupted by a yawn. "Will you be here when...?" Arthur nods, grabs Brain's hand, and tries not to panic when his eyes slide closed again. He stands there for a long time, holding onto Brain's hand and watching the rise and fall of his chest, before he remembers where he is. Since there's not much of a rush, Arthur pulls the Brain's IV out properly, cotton ball and everything, ignoring a flash of warmth when Brain murmurs and frowns briefly in protest.

    After that, Arthur packs in the PASIV, slides it under the bed, and goes to find a nurse. The one on duty looks tired, and skeptical, and pops her gum in a way that makes Arthur want to hit her, but she still goes with him when he tells her that the Brain, the Brain's real name, has woken up. On the way, she tells him about comas, about something called the Glasgow scale, and why three is a bad score to get, and she tells him that the odds of someone waking up from a five-year coma are astronomical. Arthur doesn't tell her anything else, but when she pinches the skin under Brain's nailbed and gets smacked and growled at, he can't help but crack a little bit of a smile. After that, there are a lot of doctors and phone calls, and someone he thinks might be the Brain's mother, weeping and not recognizing Arthur at all, which is fine. Nobody seems to wonder who he is, or why he's there, and so he stays, waits for them all to filter out, one by one, until it's just him and the Brain, and the Brain's mom. Now she starts to look puzzled, so Arthur introduces himself, as Brendan from high school, and Brain's mom looks surprised.

    "I hadn't thought he'd kept in touch with you," she admits, to which Arthur smiles and says that he did, which wasn't exactly a lie.

    Eventually, Brain's mom leaves, promising to come back later, and Arthur sits back down in the chair by the bedside and watches the Brain until his eyes crack open again.

    "You're still here," the Brain murmurs.

    "So are you."

    "You needed my help with something?"

    "I don't-"

    "You needed my help with something." This time, it isn't a question. "Spill."

    Arthur does, at length. Where he had edited the story of his relationship to Brain into something comprehensible for Mal, he knows the Brain can put together the messy fragments that are life's true form into something he can understand, if nobody else. The whole picture of the job, of what it is they do and who they do it with, of Cobb ("You have a thing for him, don't you?") and Mal ("Maybe, but he's extremely married."), and even Eames, at whose explanation Brain just arches his eyebrows and makes a quiet sound of epiphany. He pulls the PASIV out and explains its working and its parts, and as briefly and non-incriminatingly as he can, where it comes from. He finds himself out of the chair, and pacing as Brain watches, outlining the layers of dreams and the rules of each layer. Then he comes to what it was Cobb and Mal had done, and why it was stupid, and why he's going to kick Cobb's ass when Cobb wakes up, and why he can't right now. Throughout, Brain doesn't so much as twitch an eyelid, doesn't so much as make a discernible expression, but Arthur knows he's listening as intently as he can.

    "Okay," Brain says at length, the dying light from the windows painting his face orange and red. "Tell me what to do."

    "You have to get into his head, like you did mine. And you have to show him he's dreaming." The silence stretches for a long time.

    "Okay," repeated, the same tone of voice. "I'll see what I can do."

    "You don't have to," Arthur insists, half-heartedly because there would be nothing better than all of his friends rescued from sleep. Or as many as can be rescued.

    "This is how I show it, Brendan." Arthur's chest hurts, a little, because of course the Brain wouldn't have been in his head for five years without seeing that, wouldn't have avoided dreaming that argument too every time Arthur dreamed it. Of course. His own words. This is how I show it.

    In the end, money is what does it. Arthur calls Mal, who is very reasonable for not having heard from him for a day, while her husband spends months or years locked away inside his head, and he explains that he woke up Brain, and that Brain's agreed to do it (he looks over, at this, and gets a frustratingly level look). Mal agrees to get things started on her end, moving Cobb south to Union Memorial, as Arthur snaps the phone shut and begins to work on getting Brain into a room with empty side-by-side beds. It's money, in the end, and increasingly sharper assurances of Brain's more than acceptable state of health, the former from Arthur and the latter all from Brain himself. When they strip away the covers to move him, though, Arthur has to look away from the forest of exposed tubes. All along the corridor, and in the elevator, he walks alongside the gurney, one hand on Brain's wrist and one hand carrying the PASIV. In his pockets are Brain's dog tags and his book. The comb belonged to somebody else. Upstairs, out of that godforsaken morgue but not out of the godforsaken building, they lay Brain down in a clean, bright bed in a clean, bright room, and they begin to connect some of his tubes back up. Not all of them, but enough that Arthur feels compelled to look away again, to press his forehead to the window and count cars passing by in the darkness. When everyone else has gone, he turns back around, sets the book and the tags on the bedside table, and very carefully lays down next to Brain. On his side, Arthur drapes an arm over Brain's chest, twines fingers into Brain's hair, and goes to sleep.

    To his chagrin, Arthur is awakened by a grinning Eames after Cobb's apparently already been installed in the room. Given his line of work, he can't mind too much when people watch him sleep, but usually he's not lying on top of anybody. It's only when he unclenches his fingers from the Brain's hair that Brain wakes up, blinking and righting his skewed glasses.

    "Didn't I push you off a building?" He asks as he stares up at Eames and Arthur climbs down from the bed.

    "Ah," Eames says, nodding. "You would be the ghost."

    "The Brain," he corrects and sticks out a hand- badly trembling, pale and blue-veined, taped and IV'ed. Eames gives Brain a considering look, and shakes his hand. Introductions are made all around, which means Yusuf, Mal, and Cobb. The last, Brain stares intently at, for long enough that Arthur wonders if he hasn't already started trying to get inside the man's head. He wants to explain that Cobb's not like this awake, that it's drive and his insane vitality that make him so fascinating, that he's handsome, yes, but also funny, clever, surprising...

    "Let's get this over with." Brain is looking at him, not at Cobb, and though his expression is familiar, it is not particularly pleasant.  It's the same look he wore when he slapped Em's Missing Persons article down in front of Arthur, and Arthur doesn't know what to say, looking at Brain until he realizes everyone else is looking at him.

    "It's his call to make. He's made it. What are we waiting for?" Mal unsnaps and prepares the PASIV for first Dom, and then Brain, while Brain listens very intently to Yusuf telling him about the drug cocktail, and Eames does something unhelpful. Arthur watches the Brain, watches him try to talk with his hands and little shoulder jerks, only he hasn't moved in five years so he trembles, and aborts every gesture halfway through. It startles Arthur, still, when Mal touches his shoulder to let him know they're ready.

    On the near bed, Brain looks at him, fuzzily because no glasses.

    On the far bed, Dom looks at nothing.

    Arthur's steps to the Brain are unhurried, and he has time to watch the Brain's expression smooth as Arthur comes closer. He bends, and slides his fingers into the Brain's hair, searching for a signal. Even without his glasses, maybe especially without his glasses, Brain gives Arthur nothing useful, so Arthur just whispers "good luck" and lets him go, sinking into the chair by his bedside.He knows they're looking at him oddly, his new friends and colleagues, but Arthur can't look away from Brain as he turns and gives Mal the nod to start up the PASIV.

 

    The Brain was on his own in a new world.

    He'd spent a long time - a long time - in the dreams of another person, but they were Brendan's, and this was not Brendan's brain. The first thing he noticed was that nothing seemed to be exactly the right color. Everything was washed over with the same pale, stultifying gray that had defined the last days he could remember. He was dressed in gray as well, a wool suit that he'd probably never choose for himself, something that would be too anonymous for even the person Brendan had become. For Arthur. He still had his glasses, though, and his briefcase, and when the Brain reached into his pocket he could feel the same cold metal oblongs he had carried for so long. They were blank, too.

    Brain took his hand out of his pocket and started walking, to get his bearings. The neighborhood he was in looked industrial, full of the noise of machinery and covered with a sheen of oil. It was the only overcast day Los Angeles had ever seen, apparently, the undersides of the clouds pendulous with the chance of rain. The industrial district seemed strangely empty, despite the noise of work. It was as though a director had gotten someone to fill in the background noise without hiring any extras, and the effect was eerie enough to make the Brain shiver in his tweed. Finally, he picked a door, by feeling, and pushed it open.

    Inside, the three men and one woman turned to look at him. The woman was someone he'd never seen before, her dark, wavy hair cut in a short bob that favored her face. If he had to guess, Brain would assume she'd come to work in high heels against her better judgement, since she was standing on the concrete floor in her stocking feet. The man on the opposite of the table, blond and scruffy and, even by Brain's admittedly lax standards, strangely dressed, was the Mr. Eames of Brain's brief acquaintance. The man in the blue shirtsleeves, rolled up to his elbows, professorial-looking with his reading glasses and the gray patches in his neat beard, was a surprisingly older version of the man Brain had come to find, the one whose head-space he was sharing. And the third man was, of course, Brendan. Or rather Arthur, looking less like Brendan than Brain could have imagined. His tailoring was pinstriped and immaculate. His hair and shoes both gleamed, the former streaked liberally with white, only the latter in pure, unadulterated black. The crinkles around his eyes and mouth that had long appeared in the rare moments Arthur let himself laugh unguardedly were now there to stay. The one thing that told Brain that this was not reality, though, even more strongly than the wrenching blankness of his father's dog tags, was the look in Arthur's eyes. Arthur looked at Brain like he'd look at a stranger, cold and empty.

    Brain made himself smile in answer and gave his introduction, using his real name because why the hell not, and identifying himself as their chemist in Yusuf's absence. For a minute, he was worried that Cobb or Arthur might shoot him, but to his surprise all of them nodded, and waved him in like they'd been expecting him. He'd been told, by the Frenchwoman, to tell them that he was there to replace whichever one they didn't have, which Brain didn't think would work. He had to remind himself to give Mrs. Cobb a little more credit if he ever woke up from this.  

    Standing next to the ghost of Arthur's future, Brain felt young, and small. Even though he knew what, and who, he was here for, Arthur necessarily took up most of his attention. The arch of his back, his locked elbows and his splayed fingers as he leaned out over the diagram. The dream caught him looking, slanted dark eyes in his direction. Brain could feel Cobb looking too, in the way that he had been able to feel the pressure of Arthur's mind surrounding him for every minute of those years. Brain missed it like it was home.

    They discussed business, something Brain still only half understood despite all his eavesdropping, and then they split up, the woman 'Ariadne' to her home and waiting paramour, Arthur and Eames with arms worrisomely linked. Cobb blinked, owlishly, and said he'd left something behind, heading for a back room. On cat feet, Brain followed, easing the door shut but slamming the deadbolt shut. The sound echoed through the small space, and Cobb turned, frowning.

    "This is a dream." Cobb blinked again, began to fish around in his pockets, but Brain held up a hand. "This is your dream."

    "How-"

    "Mal sent me." The look in Cobb's eyes was heart-wrenching. Arthur was right about him. All around, there was a sense of foreboding hanging in the air like an incipient storm. Brain could feel the individual seconds ticking past, though he wasn't due to be awake for, oh, a long time.

    "My wife is dead," Cobb intoned heavily, stentorian. A line he'd learned well, evidently, through the years.

    "Your wife woke up, Mr. Cobb." Brain knelt and unzipped his briefcase. Inside, as he knew and dreaded there would be, nestled in amongst papers and a collection of Rubik's cubes, was his father's pistol. The Brain wrapped his hands carefully around it and stood.

    "Why would she send you? Who are you?" Cobb was deadly still. Brain was about ninety percent sure he had a gun on him, in his coat, and so Brain flicked the safety off his father's gun and tried to remember those ill thought-out lessons from so long ago, before.

    "Your subconscious would have killed anyone who obviously didn't belong. Anyone you already knew." So Arthur had told him, so Brain believed. "Anyone who was already here."

    "That's insane. Who sent you?"

    "Your wife." Outside, someone started banging on the door. The barrel of the gun wavered.

    "My wife is dead," Cobb repeated.

    "I never met her before today but she looks pretty alive to me. She's in Union Memorial, down south, like you. You've been in coma for a few days. She says they tried everything they could but someone has to come in and get you." The knocking on the door edged into battering, blow by blow. If the Brain had to guess, he'd put money on kicks, rather than a shoulder, two in a row and then a moment of silence while the invisible assailant geared up for another round.

    "My wife-"

    "Mr. Cobb I recognize that this is hard and that we're strangers, but it's complicatedly important to me that you _wake up_ -"

    That was when Arthur kicked the door in, naturally. Cobb's eyes went to the door, already having forgotten about the Brain, staring at his rescuer with mixed emotions plain on his face, and the Brain...

    If it had been anyone else, he would have been fine. The English guy, he'd have zero qualms about shooting. The Indian guy, Yusuf, no problem. Even the girl. Probably most easily the girl, since she doesn't even exist. But it wasn't any of them, it was Arthur. It was Brendan. So when he kicked down the door, blazing and gorgeous in his fury, the Brain couldn't do anything more than drop the gun and look at Cobb, pleadingly.

    "Don't make him-" A knee to the stomach doubled him over. The one to the face floored him, and Arthur was on him in seconds, straddling him but seriously not what he'd been hoping for. Arthur's hands wrapped around his throat, and his thumbs pushed into the Brain's trachea, and the Brain knew with absolute certainty that he was going to die. He had no more air, knew that what he should be doing was convincing Cobb with his final breath, so this could be over, so he didn't have to come back, but he only had one word left in his lungs, and it was Brendan and then everything went black.

    (In the dream, Cobb stares at Arthur, stares at the stranger with love in his dead eyes. Arthur looks cooly at him, and when Cobb asks why he killed the man, Arthur shrugs because he doesn't know.  
    Arthur shrugs because Cobb doesn't know.)

    The Brain-

    ("Why did you do that?" He asks again, bewildered.  
    "He had a gun on you," Arthur answers, but he sounds unsure. Or maybe Cobb's just imagining he sounds unsure. Or maybe he sounds unsure because Cobb imagines he would sound unsure.  
    "He said-" that this is the dream, Cobb doesn't say, because Arthur interrupts him)

    -opened his-

    ("Does it matter what he said? He was working for Smith." Was he? Cobb blinks, trying to remember having heard anything even remotely like that.  
    "You couldn't have talked to him about it?" Arthur stares at him, blankly, and Cobb runs a frustrated hand back through his hair, dislodging it badly.  
    "What was that name he called you?" He tries instead, and watches Arthur frown.  
    "I guess he mistook me for someone else.")

    -eyes to see Arthur-

    ("You're sure you don't know him? I thought you knew him." Cobb's almost sure he heard Arthur say something to that respect, that the man was... Some kind of acquaintance. In fact, he was positive they knew each other, only he couldn't remember how.  
    "He cheated me once," Arthur answers, still straddling the man's corpse though he's looking at Cobb, who can't believe what he's hearing.  
    "You wouldn't kill a man for that!" He's shouting now, he knows, getting unreasonable, but Arthur will not explain why he killed that man.  
    "I guess you don't know me as well as you think you do." Arthur stands up and dusts his hands off, looking down at the body.)

    -centimeters away and-

    ("He looked at you like you were the second coming!" Cobb protests, walking over to stand above the same, across from Arthur, who glances up at him.  
    "So?"  
    "And that's it, this is just a money thing?"  
    "No." Cobb meets his eyes, brows knit together, understanding less than ever. "I said he cheated on me once." Now his eyebrows shoot up, startled.  
    "No, no you didn't."  
    "I meant to.")

    -looking like he-

    ("How long ago was this?" Cobb tries, because he remembers Arthur'd had some flings with Eames, once or twice, but he can't ever remember Arthur taking a relationship so seriously he'd kill over it.  
    "It was a long time ago." He doesn't know what to say to that, so he says nothing. They both do, staring down at the man's body.  
    "What was his name?" Cobb asked, eventually.  
    "I don't remember anymore.")

    -might start crying-

    ("How do you not remember something like that?" Cobb is suddenly and painfully aware that none of this makes any sense at all.  
    "I guess he was more involved in it than I was."  
    "But you killed him!" Arthur frowns, cocks his head to one side.  
    "Haven't you been paying attention? He was one of Smith's agents. Do you really want to get deported again?" In the midst of the sudden flash of panic, it occurs to Cobb that he has no idea who Smith is. He knows that they're trying to con him into giving something up, but he has no concept of the man at all.)

    -so the Brain-

    ("He said that I'm dreaming right now," Cobb tries, hesitantly, disliking the shape of the words in his mouth. Arthur raises an eyebrow, ever unruffled, even in murder and insanity.  
    "I thought we'd been over this."  
    "So did I." On the floor, the man's gun is just sitting there, so Cobb bends and picks it up, checks to make sure it's loaded. It is.  
    "What are you doing?" Arthur asks him, no emotion in the man but irritation, no signs of it but in his voice and furrowed brow.  
    "I don't think you're real," Dom says, at last, opening his mouth and pressing the barrel to the roof of it, the surest way. Finally, there's the spark of real panic in Arthur, and he starts to lurch forward but it's too late because Cobb-)

    -smiled.

    (-pulls the trigger. And everything goes black.)

    "You stopped breathing for a second there," Arthur told him, ruffling the Brain's hair and echoing back the weak smile. "We got worried." Over Arthur's shoulder, the Brain could see anxiety etched into the woman's face, and suddenly it got a lot harder for him to keep the smile up.

    "I'm sorry," the Brain admitted, letting his eyes slide off her, "but I don't think I-"

    "Mal?"

    The sound was almost imperceptibly soft. It could have just as easily been a million words, but it was _Mal,_ couldn't have been anything other than _Mal,_ because on the narrow hospital bed Cobb was sitting up and staring at her.

    Brain turned back to watch Arthur, but to his surprise, Arthur was watching him. Not Cobb.

    "What happened?" Arthur asked, smoothing Brain's hair back from his face and making Brain shudder.

    "I told him he was sleeping. You strangled me."

    "Sorry." And he did look genuinely sorry, the Brain thought. He wished he could take Arthur's hand, wished he could sit up and kiss Arthur, wished a lot of things, but he knew with his shaking, weak limbs, and his headache swimming with the remains of the sedatives, he'd black out before he got there. At least Brain was pretty sure Arthur wasn't going to hit him for trying. So much for a good third of his high school anxiety.

    "I got better," he protested, then watched as Arthur's face cracked and he said Brain's name, his real name. The fingers in his hair twisted into gentle vices as Arthur bent over him. Brain's heart thudded in his ears, bringing the rising tide of unconsciousness with it, and he was pretty sure he heard his heart monitor start to go berserk a little. Then Arthur said his name again, softly, in a curl of air against his lips, shooting a jolt of heat through him as surely as the kiss that followed.

**Author's Note:**

> And cheers for my first fic written after joining this community. Actually I joined right after I started it, so it's been a few weeks. Anyway. Enough of that.  
> If you have opinions you should share them.


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